Lori Koonce wrote:So, what do you call a person who sees the artistic value in comics, Jeff Koons and Monet?

Art IMO isn't a good gauge of culture. Some of the highest of brows liked Wharhol,and some of the lowest Do Vinci. It boils down to personal preference. Case in point The Sandman graphic novels. The person who drew them was an artist. But, because he essentially drew comics, people tend to ignore that.

As I said, the question "Is it good art?" is a different thing from the question of culture. Culture is the basis from which we make such judgments. Good art disappears all the time. I think a lot of 60s era Peter Max is good art, but nobody really talks about him anymore.

But he's unconsciously referenced all the time. He's become part of the culture.

It worked. I haven't been able to sign in here for awhile. I was just going to ask Steve or Rick for help, when it decided to let me in here. I have nothing to say re current vibes; it touched me that Ezra asked about me. Had a CT scan and the shunt is the as it was. See neurosurgeon Wed. for his two cents; but for no it looks like no surgery. I do check the Pavy and the forums almost every day to see how you guys are and what's happening. Glad I can post again. Diane

The worst of that little debacle is that Le took something meant for another as a personal attack.

If Harlan hadn't spoken up when he did, I had some choice words for that person. Not sure he would have understood them, but it would have been fun to put them out there. People have me mistaken for a nice person.

Ezra Lb. wrote:Mark my perception is that popular culture is now the only thing that is taken seriously

Absolutely. Practitioners of "high" culture are always having to justify their existence, and demonstrate their "open-mindedness" - no such pressure works the other way. Who dares assert the superiority of "high" culture these days?

All over the world, orchestras are having to prove their "relevance" by playing pop music from the Beatles or Pink Floyd, or cover film scores, but pop music affectionados, (the Robert Cristgaus of the world) are under no obligation to see a symphony on its own terms. People can quite happily go through life without ever listening to classical music or watching live theatre, while any person who professes a preference for these things is immediately open to charges of "snobbery".

From what I see, pop culture's not only widely accepted, but has taken over - it is now the default culture, and all else is basically historical curiosity.

Another so-called "critic" for whom I have little regard is Ed Ward, whose historical knowledge of music is incredible (50s pop and jazz, at least) but who is aesthetically stuck in the doo-wop school of simple and once, in a review on NPR, dismissed the entirety of the 70s as a period that did nothing but bore him. He and I share nothing in common in matters of preference. The music he extolls as the ne-plus-ultra of popular culture does for me what the music I love does for him---bores me. But I don't dismiss it as forgettable and irrelevant.

Anyway, we've been down this road before, and it's a matter of understanding that there's a basic misunderstanding here. Complex is not the same as complicated and simple is not the same as simplistic. Barber's Adaggio For Strings is very simple, but it has very complex results for the careful listener. Mozart's last symphony is also relatively simple, but is nevertheless a complex work. John Cage, on the other hand, does a lot of complicated collage work that amounts to simplistic moments of dissonance that masquerade as complexity.

A lot of the music Frank dismisses as complex for the sake of complexity is simply complicated. On the other hand, a lot more of it is fairly simple that has complex consequences, which is not the same thing. The Beatles did a lot of music that was simple and yet produced complex responses. They did some that was fairly complex. They were never simplistic.

A lot of punk, however, was just simplistic, on the level of "Hey, I like that note played REAL LOUD!"

We could go on, but the point's been made. As this relates to pop culture...popular culture is the source for what later becomes "culture"---consider all the folk tunes the 19th century composers poached to create amazing pieces. Some of Brahms' best work is based on such "simple" things. So you can't ignore popular culture. But it would be worthwhile to recognize what the worthwhile aspects later become once they are incorporated into the kind of art we think of when we talk about Culture. (Tongue somewhat in cheek) consider in science fiction how Doc Smith's histrionically purple stories fed into the Star Trek mythos and the Federation then became the seedbed for Iain Banks' "Culture" stories, which are highly sophisticated, refined---dare we say, "artful"---masterpieces.

Complex is not the same as complicated, but for the simplistic they can be indistinguishable. A lot gets missed that way. A pity.